The next day Curt and I went to Mt. Rainier and hiked and camped there. It was absolutely gorgeous. The mountain was amazing (and intimidating), the flowers were blooming all over the place, and the views were incredible. I can’t say we even made it halfway up, though we got close. We had views of a glacier and waterfall and came up on the most amazing bathroom I’ve ever seen. Aside from a delta flight, I can’t say I’ve been to a toilet at such a high altitude. We camped at “Cougar Rock” campgrounds. The name was incredibly misleading as Curt and I found no older single women looking to prey upon younger men. Maybe it just wasn’t hunting season.

These first few pictures were from a “rustic garden” on the way to the park. It was too ridiculous not to stop and take pictures. I’ll stop and let the pictures do the rest of the talking… fun trip. Highly recommend it to anyone looking for some beautiful scenery and good camping.

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to head to Seattle and Portland for work. Since it was essentially a free flight for me, I decided to take advantage and bring Curt along for the ride. Neither of us have really spent any time up there, but we heard the hiking and camping was awesome. Absolutely the truth.

This first post is photos are from camping on the west coast at Rialto beach (near the town of Forks, WA where they filmed Twilight). We drove from Seattle to the coast and it was sunny and 75 degrees the entire time…. until the last quarter mile. The scenery literally changes in a second to fog, mist, and 65 degrees. The beach was like no other place I’ve been. It felt like we were hiking the Scottish coast. Fog, rocks, driftwood, rock formations… it was pretty amazing. Very different than Florida’s white sands and abundant amounts of retirees. We camped just off the beach that night, built a fire, cooked some hot dogs, then hiked back the next morning.

My goal was to get these photos up before I left for Chicago tomorrow. I got through editing about 60% of them and realized it was midnight. Luckily, the ones I hadn’t edited were the Mt Rainier daytime shots (to be in the next post), so they really didn’t need any editing. They were great straight out of the camera- even shooting RAW!

Check out the new “lightbox” feature here on the blog. Click on a photo and you can look through the entire post’s photos in a lightbox format.